From the moment the war began, many Southerners worried about enemy invasion. Tippah County seemed safe enough at first, however, for it lay deep inside the Confederacy. Few foresaw how quickly the armies of the North would conquer west and middle Tennessee and penetrate northern Mississippi. Between early 1862 and late 1864 Tippah was raided by federal troops at least sixty times. Sam’s community, in the county’s southeastern corner, was spared many of these visitations but still suffered enormously: farms were stripped of provisions and livestock, bridges and fences were destroyed, government and churches and trade were disrupted, and many slaves marched away with the invaders to freedom. The Agnew plantation was hit several times, with considerable property losses.49
The last Yankee raid that the Agnews endured prior to 1865 was an utter nightmare. In June 1864 a passing force of 7,800 federal troops was attacked by a Confederate force only half that size, under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The final stage of the ensuing day-long battle (known as Brice’s Crossroads) was fought on the Agnew plantation. When the terrifying roar of cannons and small arms finally ceased and the smoke cleared, the Agnews emerged from hiding to find the plantation sacked, its buildings riddled with bullet holes, its fields strewn with the corpses of Northern and Southern soldiers. Wounded men lay in and around the Agnew house, many screaming in pain. The dead were buried quickly and the wounded removed, but the carcasses of horses and mules took days to dispose of. For a long time the place stank of death.50
Forrest’s stunning victory in this battle cleared Tippah of invaders for a time, and the Yankees did not seriously molest the county during the remainder of 1864. Order was gradually restored and life resumed something like its customary rhythms. But neither Sam Agnew nor anybody else knew how long this state of affairs would continue. With the Yankees in possession of Tennessee, the citizens of Tippah found themselves poised vulnerably on the Confederacy’s frontier. Any day might bring another invasion, another season of chaos and ruin.51
PART ONE
WINTER
LOUIS HUGHES
South Alabamians sometimes call it simply the Bigbee. It is a short name for a long river that rolls lazily, with many twists and turns, southward from the heart of the state to Mobile on the Gulf coast. In early 1865 the Tombigbee was high and busy with steamboats. They chugged up and down the river between Demopolis and Mobile, stopping at landings here and there to load or unload. Bales of cotton and piles of Osnaburg sacks crowded the decks of many of the boats. The sacks held the more precious cargo: they were filled with salt.1
Many of the sacks were marked “Alabama.” These were loaded aboard at a stop on the east bank of the river in Clarke County, some sixty miles north of Mobile. A road led inland from the landing there, and a short distance up that road lay the Alabama state saltworks. It was a sprawling little settlement centered around a large wooden building with a veranda. This building was the headquarters, in which Louis Hughes lived and worked.2
Lou, as he was used to being called, had stepped easily into his new situation when he came to the works in 1863. A well-trained butler was a prized and useful servant, and thus Lou was immediately singled out from the other leased slaves and set to work in that role. He did a good job and became a favorite of the state salt commissioner, Benjamin Woolsey, whose office was in the headquarters. Matilda, Lou’s wife, was put to work as a cook. She, too, won the commissioner’s approval; her bread and rolls, he said, were as good as any he had ever tasted. Woolsey, a lawyer and planter by profession, had at one time offered to buy Lou and Matilda for three thousand dollars, but Boss had turned him down.3
Boss was dead now, of course. January 1, 1865, was the first anniversary of his death. His sudden passing had shocked his family and slaves but resulted in no immediate changes for Lou and Matilda. They and the other McGehee slaves stayed on at the saltworks by order of Madam, Boss’s widow, who remained at her father’s plantation in Mississippi.4
There were many slaves at the works in early 1865, perhaps 200 or more. Their muscle and sweat and skills powered an extensive manufacturing operation. It was a scene of almost constant activity, for there were all sorts of tasks to be done and the Confederacy’s salt famine generated a sense of urgency. Slave men did most of the heavy labor—boring wells, tending pumps and furnaces, chopping and hauling wood, making bricks, building levees, sacking and weighing and loading the salt. The slave women cooked and did laundry and other chores with the help of the older children. Whites did the other jobs: among the two dozen or so employed at the works, besides the salt commissioner, were a superintendent, a clerk, a bookkeeper, a commissary manager, a doctor, a wagon master, two steam-engine operators, several artisans, and a number of overseers.5
The saltworks was not just a manufacturing operation but a community, and a largely self-sustaining one. All the people who worked there lived on the site. Most of the slaves resided in barracks or cabins that were spaced neatly along a street. The whites had separate residences or took rooms upstairs at the headquarters. Like any respectable Southern village, the works had a smithy, a cooperage, a shoemaking shop, a carpentry shop, a sawmill, a gristmill, and a cemetery. It also boasted a hospital, a commissary, a sack-making shop, a storehouse, and at least one kitchen. The works produced no grain or meat (these were purchased from outside sources), but it had a dairy and a seven-acre vegetable garden that helped feed the whole community.6
Like any village, too, the works had its own economy, an informal system of borrowing and bartering, swapping and selling. Slaves as well as whites engaged in this casual commerce and Lou Hughes was one of those clever enough to make money from it. The story he tells about this in his memoir illustrates one of the curious things about the Old South: how the rigid laws and protocols of slavery and race relations were sometimes ignored in the intimacy of communal life.
As Lou tells it, one day in the early part of 1865 he approached the superintendent of the works, N. S. Brooks, about getting some tobacco. He had a hundred dollars he had borrowed from three other slaves; they had earned it doing extra chores at the works in their free time. Lou wanted this tobacco not to smoke but to resell. Brooks liked Lou and was happy to do him a favor, so he took the money and dispatched an order by boat to a merchant in Mobile. Four days later a package containing thirty-six plugs of tobacco arrived. Brooks turned it over to Lou, who, after finishing his morning duties at headquarters, set out to peddle the plugs among the black laborers at the works. Within an hour he had sold every plug at five dollars apiece, for a profit of eighty dollars. Later, as Lou was serving the noon meal in the headquarters’ dining room, Brooks asked him how he had done with the tobacco.
“I did very well,” Lou replied. “[T]he only trouble was I did not have enough.”
Brooks questioned him a little more, then drew out pencil and paper and did some figuring. His own salary was a meager $150 a month in rapidly depreciating Confederate money. After the meal, while Lou was clearing the table, Brooks came in from the veranda where he had been smoking with the clerk and made a proposition: he would order all the tobacco Lou could sell if Lou would split the profit with him fifty-fifty. Lou agreed.
Brooks ordered another shipment that day—500 plugs. When it came, Lou went into business in earnest. He recruited three other slaves as agents and gave them some plugs on consignment. The three were William, who was foreman of the wood-chopping detail; Uncle Hudson, who cared for the horses and mules; and John, who worked at the hospital. Every two or three days each would turn in his proceeds and take some more plugs. Meanwhile, whenever Lou had any free time following his afternoon chores, he would saddle up an old pony and, with Brooks’s blessing, ride around through the neighborhoods surrounding the works and sell more plugs. The other slaves were curious about the source of the tobacco, but Lou kept it a secret. “In two weeks we had taken in $1,600,” he recalled, “and I was happy as I could be. Brooks was a fine fellow—a northerner by birth, and did just what he said he w
ould. I received one-half of the money. Of course this was all rebel money, but I was sharp, and bought up all the silver I could find.”7
It must be said that few other slaves in the Old South were as successful in this respect as Lou. He held a privileged position at the works, thanks to his special skills and his close relationship with Superintendent Brooks and Commissioner Woolsey. Certainly Uncle Hudson, William, John, and even Matilda, for that matter, enjoyed no such liberties, not to mention the legions of others who did the saltworks’ daily drudgery with ax and spade and hoe. Each might carve out some personal space in the informal communal setting, but that space was very narrow. For if the saltworks embodied the casual intimacy of a Southern village, it also embodied the rigorous discipline and exacting work routines of a Southern plantation.
The slaves at the works labored six days a week. Most of them, as was customary in the South, worked from sunup to sundown; those who tended the furnaces, however, had to work in shifts both day and night, for the furnaces were kept going around the clock every day except Sunday, when all work ceased. Because most of the jobs at the saltworks required very heavy labor, Brooks and Woolsey—who shared responsibility for managing the works—preferred to lease adult male slaves. They paid the slave owners not in cash but in kind: four bushels (about 200 pounds) of salt per month for an able-bodied male hand. The payment for women and children was less, and while Brooks and Woolsey would accept any healthy slave sent to them, they encouraged owners to send only men.8
The two managers found it easy to hire white employees, for a job at the saltworks exempted a man from Confederate military conscription. But they could never get all the slaves they wanted. They tried to recruit a work force of 300 but found that many slave owners were reluctant to put their valuable property in somebody else’s hands during such uncertain times. Both spent a good deal of time corresponding with concerned lessors or potential lessors, assuring them that the slaves at the saltworks received generous rations (at least three and a half pounds of bacon and a peck of cornmeal per week, along with milk and vegetables), got skilled medical care when they needed it, and were closely supervised.9
This last was a particularly touchy matter. Brooks and Woolsey did their best to keep their leased bondsmen always under the watchful eye of some white person. They employed at least eight overseers at the works, and one even slept in the same quarters with the blacks. Nevertheless, slaves at the works could, and occasionally did, slip away. Few of these runaways were seeking freedom; in most cases they were simply reacting to some treatment they regarded as unfair. Mild protests of this sort were familiar to every Southern slave master. A typical instance had occurred at the works in March 1864, when twelve slaves owned by a Mobile couple named Ketchum ran off, upset because their cornmeal ration was short that week. All but one of the twelve eventually returned voluntarily and Woolsey sent them back to work without punishment. He then sat down to write an explanation to the Ketchums, who feared that their slaves had been mistreated or had been enticed away by “disloyal white men.” The slaves were well cared for and well protected, Woolsey insisted. The cornmeal was short only because the steam engine that ran the gristmill had broken down; it was now fixed, and he would see to it that full rations were always provided in the future. Moreover, he assured the Ketchums, he had not waited for the runaways to come back on their own: on learning of their flight, he had dispatched three overseers to track them down. “I spared no trouble or expense to get them back.”10
Few if any fugitives from the works ever made it to freedom, for—as all the slaves realized—the chances of escaping from a place so deep inside the Confederacy were slim. Even if they managed to elude the pursuing overseers, they were almost certain to fall into the clutches of local authorities somewhere. Such was the fate of three of the McGehee slaves named Sam, Devro, and Lafayette; they ran off from the works in late 1864 only to wind up in a county jail, from which Brooks and Woolsey retrieved them. Blacks traveling alone in the rural South always aroused suspicion, and they could expect to be accosted frequently and forced to explain themselves.11
Runaways were not the biggest problem the two managers had to deal with. But even little problems can be anguishing to those working under great pressure. Brooks and Woolsey shouldered a heavy burden in running the works. It was a task of great importance, for of all the shortages that plagued the Confederacy, none was more critical than the shortage of salt.
Few Southerners had foreseen such a shortage when the war began. They took their salt for granted, as it had always been cheap and plentiful. Most of it was imported from England and the West Indies, arriving as ballast in the ships that came to Southern ports to get cotton. So inexpensive was this foreign salt in the antebellum years that the South hardly bothered to produce its own. But as the blockading squadrons of the Union navy began sealing off the Confederate ports in 1861 and 1862, salt grew scarce.12
The shortage of salt was not a mere inconvenience; it was a crisis that threatened the survival of the Confederacy. Humans and livestock must have salt in their diet for good health. Moreover, in the nineteenth century meat was preserved primarily by salting, butter needed salt to stay fresh, and hides required dehydration by salt before they could be turned into leather. By a conservative estimate, the Confederacy needed 300 million pounds of salt per year—thirty-three pounds, on average, for each of its nine million inhabitants.13
Before the war, thirty-three pounds of salt could have been bought anywhere in the South for less than fifty cents; but by 1862 it cost over thirteen dollars and was sometimes hard to find even at that price. As citizens protested and appealed for help, Confederate authorities set about developing domestic sources. There were only a few places in the South where salt could be produced in quantity, and one was in Clarke County, Alabama. Underneath the palmetto flats that bordered the Tombigbee and its tributaries in this county the ground water was so saline that a kettle of it, boiled down, would yield at least an eighth of a kettle of salt. The state government held title to most of this salt-rich land, which stretched for miles along the river, and early in the war the governor declared the state holdings open to the public and encouraged individuals and businesses to exploit them. He also ordered that the state establish its own salt-making operation.14
The Alabama state saltworks opened in October 1862. Considering the general primitiveness of industry in the Old South, it was an extraordinary facility—large, technologically sophisticated, efficient. The production process began at the wells that were bored in the mucky flats to a depth of a hundred feet or so and lined with cypress wood. Steam-powered pumps, mounted on tall scaffolds erected over the wells, sucked the brine to the surface and spewed it into wooden troughs that carried it to the furnaces. There were at least four furnaces at the state works, great brick contrivances thirty or forty feet long, with towering chimneys. They were fueled by vast quantities of wood, cut in the surrounding forests. On the furnaces, large kettles and pans full of brine bubbled away until nothing was left but pure salt. Twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, the furnaces roared and the water boiled. In a good month, the state works could produce over a hundred thousand pounds of salt. After being dried and sacked, it was hauled to the river by wagon to await boats. Some of it was shipped out as payment for supplies or leased slaves, but the bulk of it was distributed among the counties of Alabama, whose citizens could purchase it at cost.15
The state saltworks was one of the last things still functioning well in the Confederacy by 1865. The rebel states, battered relentlessly by the Yankee army and navy and disintegrating internally, were sinking to their knees. The success of Superintendent Brooks and Commissioner Woolsey was remarkable considering the problems they faced, particularly the scarcity of black laborers. The two managers benefited in one sense from the Confederacy’s military reverses, for every advance of the Yankee army drove more slave owners into the Confederate interior seeking a safe place to put their slaves to work; still, t
he number of slaves the saltworks gained thereby was not enough.
Aggravating the chronic labor shortage at the saltworks was the health problem. The marshy lands that yielded the valuable brine were a breeding ground for disease. Sickness and death plagued the works, keeping the doctor busy, the hospital crowded, and the cemetery growing. As the year 1865 opened, the little community was just recovering from a malaria epidemic that had almost halted operations; Brooks reported in November 1864 that he was the only person at the works, white or black, who had not yet come down with this “swamp fever.” As he wrote, Woolsey lay prostrate in bed, too sick even to make out his regular report, and the bookkeeper appeared to be close to death. Among those who died that fall were three of the McGehee slaves, two of them children. Brooks ordered the carpenter to build coffins for the three, and then billed Madam for the cost.16
During another of the epidemics that swept the works—this one typhoid—Lou Hughes got a chance to practice another skill he had acquired: nursing. It was something he had learned years before from Boss, who had been a physician. Boss had given up his medical practice when he acquired a plantation, but he continued to treat his own slaves and he trained Lou to assist him. He prepared many of his medicines himself, using the recipes in Dr. Gunn’s popular treatise. He even had a large medicine cabinet built into a wall of his Memphis house. Young Lou was entranced. To him the cabinet was a wondrous thing, and when his master was practicing his healing craft, he seemed immensely wise and gentle. Patiently Boss taught Lou how to identify all the potions by sight and smell, and how to prepare each one and measure out the proper dosage. In this way Lou mastered the mysteries of ipecac and castor oil, Cook’s pills and mustard baths. He learned also about the medicinal herbs that grew plentifully in the South and before long he was going into the woods himself to gather slippery elm and the root of alum, poplar, and wild cherry. He absorbed not only his master’s medicinal knowledge but also his bedside skills, for Boss brought him along to the slave cabins where he treated colicky babies and dyspeptic field hands.17
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